Bring it Back for Microsoft
Pushbutton worked closely with Microsoft to design and develop an IPTV portal for the software giant’s Mediaroom platform, pulling in video from MSN.
The design was based around the IPTV browser client on the Mediaroom platform. This was the first time Pushbutton had developed an application using a live IPTV platform.
James Cumberbatch, Director of Interactive TV Development for Pushbutton said “we were really impressed with the speed and ease of development”.
One of the key challenges was understanding how much content would be available to users and how they would navigate to it. IPTV development is very different to the web, where users normally reach content through search. To address this challenge, Pushbutton’s user interface team mapped the content structure to create some typical user journeys. This lead to the development of a floating cursor navigation system, that allowed the majority of the content to be navigated by using the arrow keys and select button on the remote contole.
The integration with MSN Video was achieved by using the RSS/XML feeds that already existed on the site. These were then formatted using a combination of ASP.NET and XSLT. The final prototype was then developed in the ADK using XHTML and custom Javascript libraries.
Read more about our recent Microsoft Mediaroom development in the press section.
